Well if you do at least do not do it the way that I did – it was what is called a learning experience! I had seen someone else do some gorgeous sun prints that used a special light sensitive paper, they looked really great but I like using what I have at home, not having to buy any special materials. Although I love shopping, when I want to craft I want to do it straight away – no waiting!

I reckoned that ‘sugar’ paper fades really fast when you do not want it to, so I would use that instead. I found some interesting leaves, put my paper on a sunny window sill, grabbed some handy chestnuts to hold the leaves in place – and then instructed all to leave them alone. Now the sun does a lot of things, and one of them is to dry out stuff – which is proceeded to do with my leaves. So of course they shriveled and curled up – not really a nice clean leaf edge any more. My final print turned out to be some blurry blobs of color on the paper, not so good. However I have seen it used in other places with things that do not curl and shrivel, they used keys and scissors – perhaps I will have to try again!

But there was another interesting outcome – sort of related, remember I used chestnuts to hold down the leaves! We are over-run with chestnuts at the moment, we quite like them but never get around to cooking them, and we would still have too many to eat anyway.

So my husband took the chestnuts and threw them in the wood-burner. Now as he full knows – chestnuts expand when hot, which is why we usually cut little slits in the tops of them before cooking them. Hehehe – I can hassle him on this one for ages. The explosions started – little bits of chestnut were splattered all over the inside of the glass door of our wood-burner.

The children would have found it alarming except I was laughing so much at him and of course rolling my eyes, shaking my head – all the ‘that was silly’ signals. The children suggested counting the bangs so we knew if it would be safe to open the door to put more wood in. But as I pointed out we had not counted the chestnuts thrown in the fire, or the bangs so far. Husband rolled his eyes and said ‘it will be fine’ opened the door to add more wood and the biggest bang so far – hehehehe. I will get lots of mileage out of this one – thanks Honey!

Take two-dimensional paper, add a dash of glue and create this three-dimensional leaf.

The Autumn leaves are gorgeous around here at the moment! As if it is not enough having them on the trees, the lawn, the deck, and my socks – we are doing leaf crafts most days. This technique is so effective, and one of the easy paper crafts for children too.

Make three copies of your leaf shape – I traced around a handy one from the garden to get it just right. Run a strip of glue along the middle of one piece, layer on another shape and repeat the glue strip and adding the final shape. Instead of glue you could also use double sided tape. Once the glue it dry fold out the sides to create your shape. Just like that and it is done. These would look great sitting on a windowsill or as a mobile.

Today at our place was Family craft day! Lots of paper crafts for the children was lined up and we started with this one, making an autumn or fall tree out of our hand shapes. We all started out with tracing our hands onto colored paper to make the bunches of leaves for the tree. But not all plans go as expected and today the children were distracted by an exciting game they were playing and they had to dash off and fight dragons. So I made a tree trunk and cut out the leaf shapes all on my own. Oh well, just as well I love cutting stuff out.

But I can happily report that despite dragons, our family hand tree turned out really well!